Fate of South Florida journalist Steven Sotloff now on world stage

A grisly recording of Islamic jihadists decapitating an American journalist that was posted on the Internet Tuesday revealed more than just the group’s pitiless, homicidal soul. It also uncorked one of the Middle East’s dirty little secrets: that a Pinecrest man has been held hostage in Syria for a year by militants who now threaten to kill him.

A grisly recording of Islamic jihadists decapitating an American journalist that was posted on the Internet Tuesday revealed more than just the group’s pitiless, homicidal soul. It also uncorked one of the Middle East’s dirty little secrets: that a Pinecrest man has been held hostage in Syria for a year by militants who now threaten to kill him.

Thirty-one-year-old Steven Joel Sotloff, a former University of Central Florida student who has spent years reporting from Middle Eastern hot spots for Time magazine and other news media, was kidnapped in Syria near the Turkish border last August.

Except for a single phone call to his parents in December, he hadn’t been seen or heard from again until he appeared in the video purportedly posted by the militant Islamic group that calls itself the Islamic State, shortly after the scenes of the decapitation of another American journalist, 40-year-old James Foley of New Hampshire.